Red Cedar

Appropriate Technology
Open Source Software, building democracy, and seizing the means of communication for ourselves

For those of you who don’t know, the Resist! Collective is a group of Vancouver-based activists working to provide communications and technical services, information and education to the greater activist community. Founded in 1999 as TAO-Vancouver, Resist! starting providing services in its own name through resist.ca in 2002. We currently host about 1800 email accounts, a few hundred web sites and a bunch of mailing lists and are responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of an environment that activists and their allies around the world use daily for their communications needs.

Although our collective is founded along anarchist principles, our members come from the broad spectrum of resistance and use Resist! for news distribution, action planning, protest calendars, discussion forums, personal blogging, video and audio sharing, basic email and web services. Pretty much whatever people want to use our servers for, we try to allow within reason, and we manage to do this level of support with about $300 per month (generated in user donations) and anywhere between 5-10 collective members who help out with different aspects of support.

One of my favourite things out of our basis of unity and mission statement is the Resist!tag-line “Appropriate Technology” which of course can be read either as “appropriate” ie “the right technology for your needs, or as “appropri*ate*” meaning “taking technology over for your own purposes” and which both describe what we as a collective do. It’s in this context that I want to discuss the open source movement and why it’s important not only to our fundamental democracy, but particularly with regards to the collapse of traditional media space.

So why is open source software Appropriate Technology?
Resist! and pretty much all of the tech collectives like us globally (austici, riseup, mutualaid, interactivist etc.) have always been committed to the use of open source technology as a core principle, and specifically our servers are all built on the Debian Linux platform. Additionally we use open source encryption in the form of SSL, Drupal and WordPress for web publishing, Squirrelmail and Roundcube for webmail, Mailman for mailing lists – the list goes on and on. There is simply no question for us when it comes to choosing a new product for one service or another that open source is the only way for us.

What is it that makes open source different, and ultimately better for us?

1) Open Source Software is free. As in, it doesn’t cost anything to download or run. Those of you who have purchased software for your home computer know how expensive or annoying it is to have to pay and pay again for basic pieces of operability for your machine. But when you get to the level of hosting hundreds or even thousands of users, proprietary software like a Microsoft Content Management System become cost prohibitive even to large organizations. Many software packages these days require a per-user licence fee to be paid annually which can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Free software allows us to offer services to web users at a reasonable cost (free, or by donation) that would otherwise be out of reach in a commercial/corporate-free environment.

2) Open Source Software is more democratic. This goes back to that free point. Under current “free” web media, services require that you view or click-through advertising in order to access your service. Some sites like Flickr want you to give up your digital rights to mark your images with metadata when you use their site to store your photographs, still others maintain that works on their sites belong to them in whole or part. Services like gmail mine your data in order to create a digital profile of you ensuring that the right advertising gets shown to you at the right time and simultaneously infringing on your privacy. While it is true that you agree to sign your rights away to use these services, in a world without open source there would be no other option except to do that. Ie: No choice. Open Source Software allows us to keep our privacy and the integrity of our data. Additionally, the ability for groups like Resist! to exist allows you to choose services that will not censor or delete your material.

3) Open Source Software has the possibility of being more secure than proprietary software. Despite what some Microsoft hacks will tell you, open source is not inherently more insecure – nor is it inherently more secure than proprietary software – but because the code is open and available for inspection it has the possibility of being inspected for bugs, backdoors and hacks in a way that proprietary software does not. Additionally, more people work on open source applications and are involved with the code base so can respond quickly to hacks or insecurities. When Microsoft or any other corporation puts a piece of software on your machine or “auto-updates” for your convenience – neither you nor any other home user really knows what’s been added or taken away. Was a keystroke logger part of your recent Office install? If not now, the surveillance future we’re looking at certainly makes that a possibility.

So in terms of what we want to be able to offer our users open source software gives us product that is largely non-corporate, flexible in terms of application use, freedom from censorship and message control, greater privacy and greater security. If FOSS didn’t exist, collectives and services like Resist! wouldn’t exist – and we believe we bring a greater perspective to the web than would otherwise exist….

Which brings me to: Appropriating Technology

Of course one could posit that technology is neutral, so it’s the intentions we appropriate, but when the Canadian government invested big money in bringing Internet services to almost every community in Canada – you can be sure it wasn’t with the goal of opening the door to more citizen participation in widely distributing criticism of the government. Back in 1998, that seemed like such a far-off possibility really, because only newspapers and other news media had credibility while those early bloggers and web pundits were seen as merely cranks in the wilderness of *real* opinion. That is, opinion printed in the Globe and Mail.

Corporate Canada back then believed so fervently in the newspaper as the shaper of public opinion that starting in the mid-nineties they created and paid for a newspaper which for the last ten years has consistently lost money (which might have indicated to them that so few people were buying it no one’s opinion was being shaped by the national post.)

But as we know today, as newspapers and television stations fall all around us, this media so heavily invested in has no clothes, and the rise in popular news blogging sites, is just one example of what is filling this new void in our media landscape. (unfortunately stupid baby tricks on YouTube are also filling part of that void but we’ll just leave that alone for now). Credible protesters, such as Alexandra Morton who protests against the Fish-Farming industry in BC use their own blogs to generate media interest, to create their own media, and to organize their supporters in opposition to a corporate society that up until ten years ago controlled the means of mass communication.

Morton, of course, is not the only one. We have whole alt-media co-operatives such as the Media Coop, Indymedia and Alternet whose sole business is to promote views of society that differ from those put forward by the mainstream news, and with the goal that people from anywhere in Canada can find these views and ideas through the power of the search engine, can comment on them, can participate in. While this seemed merely an interesting point in 2001, the collapse of mainstream media today makes it clear that people are looking for a different model of media delivery, as well as some different points of view.

The world of alt-media is an open source world, of course. The Media Coop runs on Drupal, Alexandra Morton uses moveable type. Indymedia built their own code from the ground up (for better or worse) – Alternative Media has accessibility as its core mantra and per-user licence fees, the piracy of information by for-profit companies – these things just don’t promote accessibility. A democratic media is all about access, and with the tools that we build and use in the world of open source, we can provide that access like never before.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not as though I believe we’ve reached some kind of social nirvana, and it’s clear that governments like Canada want a lot more control over the Internet than they’ve currently got (the “Lawful Access” bill, has died on paper twice but was brought back again this summer in a new form). And of course, as long as we rely on corporate carriers for our bandwidth, the communications of radicals and thinkers always rely on the benevolence of a society that still believes in human rights…… It’s a less than perfect model, to be sure.

But open source software provides a platform like no other to voices from around the margins, a place to speak and to listen with less control and surveillance than might otherwise exist. This notion of appropriate technology does more than allow a group of anarchists to run an internet service, but promises greater control over your individual information, ideas and struggles than is possible in a traditional corporate software or media paradigm. At the end of the day we’re talking about the freedom to share and access the tools we need and we’re providing a model for the kind of society we want to live in.